Note 308: As Joseph Rykwert and Alberto Pérez-Gómez observe, doubt was formally cast on Alberti's concinnitas by Claude Perrault, whose archaeological and anatomical research demonstrated "no close correspondence between musical and visual harmony as earlier theorists of both music and of architecture implicitly believed."

"The ontological concept of proportion in Pacioli's work ... owes a greater debt to the tradition that extends from Plato himself to Nicholas of Cusa's coincidentia oppositorum and Alberti's concinnitas" (Pérez-Gómez, "Glass Architecture," 259). back

The belief in a syncretic union between sight and hearing, "the ministers of reason," 216 is expressed by Alberti: "The very same numbers that cause sounds to have that concinnitas, pleasing to the ears, can also fill the eyes and mind with wondrous delight."

The mnemonic role of architectural ornament casts a different light on Alberti's seemingly contradictory discussion of concinnitas, whereby an architectural construct is conceived as an irreducible whole, yet structure is distinguished from ornament.